Mess Free Acorn Activity for Kids

This mess free acorn activity for kids is super simple but it has loads of great ideas behind it! For the littlest kids it makes a fun sensory play experience but for older kids you can use it to talk about seasons, colour mixing and even use it to support literacy! And of course as a mess free activity there isn’t loads of stuff to clean up afterwards or little hands to try and clean. Perfect!

Mess free acorn activity for kids: Materials

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Ziplock plastic bag

Paint – blue and orange or red and green

Black pen

Let’s make it

Start by drawing an acorn onto your ziplock bag. Normal felt tip pens are rubbish for this as the colour doesn’t stay and biros can tear the plastic so are pretty useless too. I use one of these pens which works on pretty much everything (including the kids school uniforms which makes it a lifesaver round here!)

Next up squeeze the paint into the bag. Last year my kids and I made this cute walrus craft and ran out of brown paint. I presumed that to make brown paint you would need to mix red, yellow and blue. That’s how you make it, right?! Nope. We mixed all three together and it just looked like sludge. Not brown paint sludge like you’d want to paint a walrus with but just sludge. Instead to make brown paint you need to mix blue and orange or red and green paints together.

Once your paint is in the back close the zip – if you are doing this activity with young kids you might want to put some packing tape on it to be super safe. You’re now ready to squish your paint around!

Some ideas for your mess free acorn activity:

So you’ve filled the bag with paint – now what? Well you’re free to just squish the paint around and try and mix the colours until it turns brown. Actually that feels pretty good and if you or the kids are having a bad day it makes a nice stress reliever too! It’s also a good opportunity to talk about the seasons and seeds. Who eats acorns? Do they eat them all at once or hide them? Do you know what kind of trees acorns come from? Another great way to use this mess free acorn activity is for practising mark making or letters. Preschool kids can do mark making, using their fingers to draw straight or wavy lines or maybe some shapes and older kids can practice letters – can you do an a for acorn, trying upper and lowercase letters.

Don’t forget about this!

I love looking at kids crafts and activities but I have two young kids and I forget about stuff a lot (what day is it again?!) If you want to remember this activity make sure you bookmark it or pin the image at the bottom of this page.